All around my suburban city are obscure taxidermy advertisements. In one conversation over lunch, my friends and I joked about our theories on who might have put up those signs, and what might happen behind the scenes in their shop. Not long after, we had our premise for Todd's Taxidermy.

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There were a few key things we knew we had to get right in order to raise the stakes for our film. Namely two: costumes and locations. All too often we saw student films being made at home with characters wearing whatever the actors had on that day. Not that that immediately makes for a bad film, but we wanted to go bigger and stand out. Costumes were easy enough, but locations proved more difficult. At first, I had the idea to film Todd's taxidermy shop at an abandoned cigar factory in Tampa, but after countless hours of searching, scouting, and phone calls, it wasn't something feasible for us to obtain as high school students. That's when we turned to alternatives, and then we found it: the Dade City Pioneer Museum. I remember vividly the phone call that made it happen. Brayden and I paced the commons of our school during lunch, trying to skid around the true nature of our film. When that failed, we told it as it was. I'll never forget the laugh we received over the phone after telling them we wanted to use their museum for our serial killer human taxidermy film.